Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Gotham Books | July 2008 | eISBN : 978-1-4406-3126-9 | ePUB/Mobi/PDF | 4.15/4.48/6.16 mb
http://www.amazon.com/Drink-Cultural-History-Alcohol-ebook/dp/B001CRPMTO
Alcohol is a fundamental part of Western culture. We have been drinking as long as we have been human, and for better or worse, alcohol has shaped our civilization. Drink investigates the history of this Jekyll and Hyde of fluids, tracing mankind's love/hate relationship with alcohol from ancient Egypt to the present day. Drink further documents the contribution of alcohol to the birth and growth of the United States, taking in the War of Independence, the Pennsylvania Whiskey revolt, the slave trade, and the failed experiment of national Prohibition. Finally, it provides a history of the world's most famous drinks-and the world's most famous drinkers. Packed with trivia and colorful characters, Drink amounts to an intoxicating history of the world.
Following his earlier treatise on tobacco, historian Gately focuses on another of humanity’s consuming passions: alcoholic beverages. Beginning with classical civilizations, he traces the rise of vintner, brewer, and distiller, whose demand for fruits, grains, and new markets helped fuel the expansion of empires. Gately contrasts Christianity’s intimate embrace of the fruit of the vine with Islam’s absolute rejection of intoxicating libations. European explorers carted wines over oceans only to discover that New World civilizations had already concocted their own sophisticated and highly drinkable spirits. Rum became inextricably bound with slave trading, and mass production and undisciplined consumption of whiskey and gin threatened to unravel the social fabric of newly industrialized European and American economies. Governments adopted different strategies for dealing with alcohol abuse, ranging from regulation of the opening hours of public houses to outright prohibition. A grand, always engaging survey of the role of booze in both cultural and social history.
